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This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Death of the Author Follow

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"A narrator should not supply Trope Launch Pad
interpretations of his work; otherwise
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he would not have written a novel,
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which is a machine for generating
interpretations." Go Ad Free!
— Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name Crucial Browsing 
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...is the birth of the reader.
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Death of the Author is a concept
from mid-20th Century literary
criticism; it holds that an author's
intentions and biographical facts "I swear, this novel will be the end of me."
(the author's politics, religion, etc)
should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. This is
usually understood as meaning that a writer's views about their own work are no more
or less valid than the interpretations of any given reader. Intentions are one thing. What
was actually accomplished might be something very different. The logic behind the
concept is fairly simple: Books are meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers
interpret them are as important and "real" as the author's intention. On the flip side, a lot
of authors are unavailable or unwilling to comment on their intentions, and even when
they are, they don't always make choices for reasons that make sense or are easily
explainable to others (or sometimes even to themselves).

Likewise, as some critics note, it is elitist to assume that all artists are intellectuals or
they have to be intellectuals, i.e., that works with deep meaning and ideas come only
from people who are culturally and philosophically learned, rather than deriving from
instinct, observation, creative inspiration, and artistic genius. Many consider this the
Shakespeare authorship fallacy, i.e., that because Shakespeare was unlikely to
possess the intellectual wherewithal to write his plays, the alderman's son from Stratford
cannot have been the author of deep philosophical plays with dazzlingly complex
characters. The academic consensus and textual studies overwhelmingly support
William Shakespeare as the author and they note that whatever makes the plays deep
comes entirely from command of language, stagecraft, and dramatic intuition, and while
these skills can be intellectualized they are not innately intellectual, and while there's
great depth, power, and meaning to a number of scenes in his plays the reasons for
such meaning can vary between appealing to different kinds of audiences, subverting or
parodying a convention that had already gotten stale way back then, or simple
playfulness.

Although popular amongst postmodern critics, this has some concrete modernist
thinking behind it as well, on the basis that the work is all that outlives the author (hence
the concept's name) and we can only judge the work by the work itself. The author's
later opinions about their work are themselves a form of criticism and analysis, and
therefore are not necessarily consistent with what's written unless the author or
publisher actively goes back and changes it—and it can still be argued that, since the
original work still exists, the author has merely created a different version of it. One
critic's understanding of the author's background and opinions is likely to be just as
accurate as another's, especially if the author has an idiosyncratic or even anachronistic
perspective on their own work. Modernists are more likely to appeal to the similar-yet-
different concept of the Intentional Fallacy, which does not discount biographical
information or other works by the same author. Playwright Alan Bennett claims he
responded to students asking for assistance on analyzing his works as part of their A-
Levels to "treat [him] like a dead author, who [is] thus unavailable for comment".

Needless to say, many writers as well as many other critics, don't like this or believe that
this view holds true for all authors and all works. Margaret Atwood famously remarked
that if the Death of the Author theory became prevalent, then "we [writers] are all in
trouble". They also disagree with the implication that the Death of the Author/Birth of the
Reader means that all interpretations are equally valid or that a reader's creative
sensibility (if it exists) is equal to that of a writer. Obviously, some writers are more
talented and capable than others, and certain works can only be written by certain
individuals. The notion also offends writers since it potentially leads to an overvaluing of
the intellectual property of their works rather than the creative/legal rights of the author
which has a contentious history in much legal and copyright disputes between creators
and publishers. J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged the influence of his experiences on his
works (The Lord of the Rings), but he denied that he had written allegory, insisting that
his works simply had Applicability; this arguably makes him an early supporter of the
Death of the Author, since pointless speculations about an author's allegorical intent are
exactly what the concept seeks to avoid, favoring an analysis of the "applicability" of the
text itself. On the other hand, Tolkien and his estate are quite protective of his works to
ensure that it respects the overall basic intent of his work and restrictive over what filters
in adaptations. One could therefore make the argument that he meant a person could
see what they personally wished in his work; so long as they didn't try to push that that
is what he had meant all along, or use a personal viewpoint in official adaptations.

In his essay "Creative Writing and Daydreaming" Sigmund Freud broached on the
concept by noting that writers who work in popular genres tend to create works more
reflective of the tensions and desires of the society as a whole than more artistic writers
whose works mainly reflect their own sentiments and desires, which was an early
attempt at qualifying intentionality in a work of art while also providing nuanced views on
which kinds of works and authors display stronger intent than others.

Some people have noted that Roland Barthes, who actually wrote the trope naming
essay, probably had to say "No, that's not what I meant at all!" at least once in his
lifetime while discussing it. They have a point. In that essay, while discussing a story by
Honoré de Balzac through a very close reading, Barthes simply noted how in the act of
writing a complex work, Balzac's voice as author diffuses into multiple planes, so that
one cannot know from reading closely if the narrative voice, character voice, and plot
voice truly expresses the author's perspective; one cannot necessarily extract insight
into Balzac's own thoughts, viewpoints, and beliefs from the work through such a
reading. For Barthes, the act of writing (and he meant writing only, with no hint as to
how this trope applies to other media), allows the author to lose some of his conscious
self and that for a work to be enjoyed, a reader has to project some of his own thoughts
and views. Barthes' argument was based on close-reading i.e. the scattered random
sentences in a story and other bits of detail, Rewatch Bonus and so on, not, as this
trope is usually applied, on basic fundamental story beats and major plot points, in
which the author's intent is far more conscious and clear. Barthes was challenging the
assumption that the author had clear and conscious intentions about every part of his
work, but was not proposing that the author had no intentions at all.

Barthes was also discussing a 19th Century author who—while certainly popular—did
not write in genres with a vocal fanbase who had questions about everything and a
medium to transmit those discussions and views to a wider community. Because
fandom and other conventions have grown so much in modern times, prominent
authors tend to be interviewed far more often than they might have been in the past,
putting greater pressure on them to stay consistent. Some authors, such as Ray
Bradbury and William Gibson can't be bothered to stay consistent when talking about
the major themes or concepts in their books for more than a few years at a time.

In the case of non-literary media, some critics note that the material nature of the
medium and the logistics of production often require some amount of clarity of intent.
For instance, for a film to be made, in most cases the director, the cast, and the crew
have to know beforehand what the story is, what a scene does, and what choices have
to be made in terms of costumes, lighting, and special effects. Producers and others
also need to get permission to shoot scenes at particular locations, and usually such
permissions depend on the approval of the scene by the location hosts. Therefore there
can be less room than in writing for the author to be ignorant of the overall intent of their
work, and Death of the Author defenses in such cases can be disingenuous, or
sometimes even dangerous. For instance, the Nazi era film-maker Leni Riefenstahl
claimed in the post-war era that her propaganda film Triumph of the Will should be
celebrated as a pure work of art independent of its politics, and that she didn't really
have political intentions in making it. This claim is belied by the obvious logistics of the
entire production, the level of state backing needed for the shooting of many scenes,
and the fact that she went to painstaking lengths to show Hitler and the Nazi party in the
most flattering possible light. The level of documentation during production—from
screenplay drafts, to shooting script, to the different stages of production and editing—
are also often documented publicly, with much information on multiple productions
noting the variety of subtle and major changes made at different stages. As such, it's
quite possible to figure out what the intent really is by noting the changes and shifts at
multiple stages of productions.

An author at a later moment may come around to rejecting their own work, or express
dissatisfaction with some parts and not others. Hence, "the perfect is the enemy of the
good" (a.k.a., "coulda, woulda, shoulda"). This is why some, but not all, auteur
filmmakers oppose the notion of a Director's Cut, or of the creators fiddling with and
updating a film after its initial release, on the grounds that the "real" film will always be
the one people saw in cinemas in the year of release, not the ideal film in the director's
head. In any case, most directors never get a chance to alter their work after it’s been
released, since very few of them have the legal and financial resources to actually do
this. This is a given in works where the authors don't hold a copyright and can be
replaced, especially Shared Universes; if a writer is fired and replaced by another,
anything the old writer has stated in interviews can be (and often is) freely Jossed by
the new writer.

There is an Older Than Feudalism example about some Jewish sages having an
argument about their law...and ignoring God's interpretation in favor of their own.
Because you see, the Torah is not in Heaven. There is another in the Apology of
Socrates: Socrates testifies that in his search for a wiser man than himself, he listened
to the great poets. He thought their works very fine, but when they tried to explain them,
he thought they were hopeless—and that the dumbest spectators around would do a
better job. (He took this as proof that their poetic skills were a divine gift rather than an
exercise of intellect.) It could be argued, however, that this hypothesis removes the only
objective standard by which a text can be said to have a given meaning, or even any
meaning at all. For since there are few times one could back up their interpretation of a
poem with evidence, this hypothesis reduces all possible interpretations to mere
subjective opinions (or at best, educated guesses). It might also be asked that, if it is
meaningless for someone to say "That's not what I meant" when talking about any
literature they might have written, then how can it be meaningful for any other situation
where one might say that? How, for example, could a general criticize an underling for
getting something absurd out of a set of instructions he or she may have given them?
"Sir/ma'am, what makes you think you know what the orders meant just because you
wrote them?"

Bottom line: A) when discussing a fictional work with others, don't expect "Author
intended this to be X; therefore, it is X" to be the end of or your entire argument; it's
universally expected that interpretations of fiction must at least be backed up with
evidence from within the work itself and B) don't try to get out of analyzing a work by
treating "ask the author what X means" as the only or even best way to find out what X
means — you must search for an answer yourself, young seeker. Writing is the author's
job; analyzing the work and drawing conclusions based on it is your job — if the author
just gave away the answers every time, where would the fun be in that?

Related tropes include Shrug of God, The Walrus Was Paul (when the author
encourages fans and critics to find their own interpretations), and Misaimed Fandom
(which is what can happen when they do so). Often the driving force in Fanon
Discontinuity where the fans dislike the author's interpretation to the point of ignoring it.
This trope can be particularly useful and sometimes even encouraged in regard to
tropes like Accidental Aesop, Broken Aesop, and others; see Warp That Aesop.

This trope does not mean "there is no such thing as canonicity for a work's
events", which is a common misinterpretation of this theory used to justify Canon
Defilement. It only proposes that questions not explicitly answered by the text of
the work cannot simply be resolved by Word of God or by trying to guess the
author's intention. Compare this trope with Applicability and the Fiction Identity
Postulate. A somewhat related trope is Word of Dante. This trope is not for literal
deaths; Died During Production covers certain cases in which an author leaves behind
unfinished work, while other cases fall under People Sit on Chairs.

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